8 is fine for a tablet.
8 is not fine for a brand-fucking new state of the art laptop.
Submitted 4 weeks ago by Dragxito@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world
8 is fine for a tablet.
8 is not fine for a brand-fucking new state of the art laptop.
“With an apple silicon architecture, 8gb is like 16gb” -some stupid apple flunkey
The irony is that it’s arguably the opposite, since the GPU and CPU just have a shared memory pool, rather than having dedicated memory and the shared memory pool.
So if you’re watching a 4k video, you might have lost a gigabyte or two just for VRAM.
That was just after face planting in a Scarface size pile of cocaine as is standard procedure with all apple marketing teams
It’s not even enough for a tablet and apple know it, which is why the iPad Pro has 16GB of RAM
8 GB is fine for a medium-priced laptop, where you can add more or at least swap out the existing stick for a bigger one if you ever need it.
Sure or a phone.
My iPad has 3GB RAM and honestly that’s enough. I don’t know what you do on your tablet, but for my everyday activities I have never felt limited
iPads don’t really multitask so it is super easy to hide the low ram with swap.
We’re talking about laptops though. I was just using tablets as a comparison point.
It’s totally so they can list a really low “starting at” price and then upsell marked up parts in the configurator.
Disclaimer: I didn’t read the article and just came in to shit on scummy business practices that I made assumptions about.
Your assumption is based and factual
They’ll continue selling these, purely because of two reasons:
Practically all of us know that the difference between these memory modules is pocket change, when mass produced like this, but for those extra couple cents, they get an extra 100$ from you
On an Air, 8gb is the bare minimum that is realistically viable, for people who don’t do anything than browse the web
Thanks to the modern web, web browsing of one of the most RAM intensive tasks. Add a few Electron based apps and you’re in hell.
For browsing the web 4 GB is enough, unless you do some multitasking. Still I wouldn’t buy a computer with less than 8 GB of RAM nowadays.
Practically all of us know that the difference between these memory modules is pocket change, when mass produced like this, but for those extra couple cents, they get an extra 100$ from you
This is called capturing consumer surplus through segmentation. There’s a pretty good explanation of it here.
The long and short of it is that some people are just perfectly fine spending more money on a macbook, and apple wants to give them a good enough excuse to do so.
I think it’s mostly to have a price tag that doesn’t immediately turn off people.
Yes, Apple is expensive in general, however people are generally fine with paying a premium. But if they’d come at you immediately with the full price for a reasonably specced machine, it would still turn many people off.
Instead they fix you on with a high, but still somewhat reasonable price and then upsell you in steps for everything. Like sure you could buy the 128gb iPhone pro, but then the storage will fill up fast with photos and videos. A great camera system being the huge selling point of the device.
On a side note I actually find the 256gb non upgradeable/replaceable ssd much more egregious, than the 8gb RAM. As you say, for people with basic needs (and that is actually a quite large group), it is enough for daily use. Those people just browse the Web, view photos and write short documents in word. However especially if they have an iPhone and take lots of picture/videos, they will still fill up that storage fast. And then it gets really frustrating, unless you maybe pay even more to outsource everything to the icloud and pay monthly.
The low ram and storage are to drive you up 2 tiers.
By the time you go “256gb isn’t enough storage, so I’ll pay 10% more for something useable”, you are pretty much at the stage of “if I’m spending this much, I might as well get the ram upgrade as well”. And suddenly you are paying $500 more.
That’s just the reality we’re in now. All components will eventually ship as a single bundle, and there’s nothing you’d be able to do. Obviously there are speed and latency benefits to this, but it comes at a cost of a colossal amount of e-waste with hardcoded serial numbers. This only works in their favor, because the groups of people you’ve described will just return to the shop, and buy a more expensive model
An extra $100 takes you from 8GB to 64GB on a PC if you install it yourself.
If you have a laptop that supports that, yeah. Which you should, but isn’t always true.
When they charge many $100s for an extra 8gb the value of the bare minimum 8gb doesn’t look so terrible (if only comparing to Apple). Especially considering the performance of swap on a fast SSD.
8GB of RAM is perfectly usable, but on a new computer, with that price, non-upgradable… ech…
Less is more, removing features is a innovation - apple
removing features is
innovationcourage.
and selling with an extra apple logo is the newest thing.
my 3 year old phone has more RAM than that
This is nothing to brag about, when Android needs this to run smoothly, compared to the same performance of a 6 GB iPhone.
Who let the apple marketing people in here?
Android has a garbage collector, meaning it requires an additional 2GB of RAM of overhead to keep things smooth. iPhones run significantly hotter than Androids, and consume more energy to achieve their performance gains.
It’s not true to simply state “one is better than the other”. There’s various metrics in which either one may be better.
Zero reason why any modern computer should be less then 16gb
Honestly we’re kinda edging up to the point where I think 32gb of ram should be the minimum, especially for heavy use cases like games and production jobs.
Even then, 32GB might be cutting it a bit fine for production or professional work.
Most heavy games do need 32GB ram. 16GB RAM will overflow to page file and we all run QLC SSDs, it’s gonna get corrupt over time being in constant writes.
this is a trap to upsell you 16 GB or sell you upgrade
You can’t upgrade a Macbook’s ram, you need to replace the whole machine
for grossly inflated pricing, in proud apple tradition.
It’s also a nice way to tax their poorest customers more. A lot of people are keeping their machines way past what apple provides updates for, if the ssd that can’t be changed dies (because of constant swapping) faster than what they intended or could keep the machine for, I guess it’s too bad for them.
most powerful chip available in a laptop and arguably one of the greatest overall laptops ever made 8 gb ram
lol
It’s a strategy to push customers toward the more expensive models. Their markup is massive, it’s a blatant profit move.
And, since the ram is soldered to the fucking mobo, you can’t upgrade it yourself. It’s a ridiculous and craven strategy for a company already nickel and diming their customers.
but the cultists still love them.
They’ve being doing this for a very long time, and they do it on all their idevices too (with storage).
Their silicon is really good. I’d argue it is mostly because they have a node advantage but it is what it is.
But especially in the MacBook Air it can only really show off its stuff in the short-bursty workloads of casual users (and Geekbench). My four-year-old PC would pull ahead quite quickly on any task when you actually have to run it at load for a while.
It also is perfectly fine for running a few minute long compile cycles - without running into thermal throttling. I guess if you do some hour long stuff it might eventually become an issue - but generally the CPUs available in the Airs seem to be perfectly fine with passive cooling even for longer peak loads. Definitely usable as a developer machine, though, if you can live with the low memory (16GB for the M1, which I have).
I bought some Apple hardware for a customer project - which was pretty much first time seriously touching Apple stuff since the 90s, as i’m not much of a friend of them - and was pretty surprised about performance as well as lack of heat. That thing is now running Linux, and it made me replace my aging Thinkpad x230 with a Macbook Pro - where active cooling clearly is required, but you also get a lot of performance out of it.
The real big thing is that they managed to scale power usage nicely over the complete load range. For the Max/Ultra variants you get comparable performance (and power draw/heat) on high load to the top Ryzen mobile CPUs - but for low load you still get a responsive system at significantly less power draw than the Ryzens.
Intel is playing a completely different game - they did manage to catch up a bit, but generally are still running hot, and are power hogs. Currently it’s just a race between Apple and AMD - and AMD is gimped by nobody building proper notebooks with their CPUs. Prices Apple is charging for RAM and SSDs are insane, though - they do get additional performance out of their design (unlike pretty much all x86 notebooks, where soldered RAM will offer the same throughput as a socketed on), but having a M.2 slot for a lower speed extra SSD would be very welcome.
My 6 year old CHROMEBOOK has 16gb…
My 13 year old MB has 16GB.
It came with 8GB and at some point I spent $50 or so to add another 8GB.
You know, back when upgrading Macs was a thing.
Ok Gramps, we need to get you to bed now
Because Chrome takes up 75% of it.
Laugh. I made fun of Chrome.
Wamp wamp so true
Let’s put 100hp in this new apple truck that weighs 9000lbs!
What? Our competitors have 350hp? It doesn’t matter! Our 100hp is very efficient and performs just as well!*
*only when compared to light usage and not towing or driving on inclined roads
A more apt analogy would be to use the truck bed size. Horsepower is more akin to the CPU speed.
Most people don’t fill their truck bed just like most people don’t fill their RAM. I’ve had no issues with my family users who just do typical light laptop tasks on 8GB RAM. I think the memory upgrades need to be much, much cheaper, but 8GB works absolutely fine IME. I would like 16GB but it’d be a waste for the other users in my household.
You’re in the minority actually.
Why buy an overpriced Mac and not use it to its full potential?
Just for the logo on the back?
Such a weird hill to die on for Apple. How much does it really cost to just add 8GB more RAM? $5?
This is just like the iPhone (lack of) storage and the (lack of) SD cards. Apple is trying to maximize profits by using less RAM and by forcing people into buying more hardware in a few years. Apple does a lot of stuff very well but then they also pull this crap.
Acknowledging that 8GB only delivers mediocre performance at best would upset anyone who already bought a device with only 8GB.
The fun think is that I don’t think apple would mind abandoning these people. Most of them would just buy a new device.
My guess is they’re going to sell like hotcakes to clueless parents whose kids insist their first laptop needs to be apple
Its all on-die not on the board, so Apple gets to charge you more.
I like Apple. Got Apple Watch, AirPods Pro and iPhone. I love the design of MacBooks however I refuse to ever buy MacBooks.
Overpriced like crazy. For half of the price you can get a really great laptop.
I’m honestly even thinking to buy a €200 android device to get used to the system.
I’m honestly even thinking to buy a €200 android device to get used to the system.
Don’t. Unless it’s a slightly older Pixel A-series 2nd hand phone. Manufacturers of cheap Android phones skimp on everything and add bullshit crapware. Shit like that is the cause of many “Android sucks” comments.
Ohh that’s sad to hear. I was thinking to get the Samsung Galaxy A14.
It’s weird how you draw the line at MacBooks for being overpriced, considering every other apple device you name dropped is equally overpriced.
My mid-range smartphone from 2022 has 8gb of ram. I paid $250 for it brand new.
The 8gb ram MacBook works great for your average Mac user. The person who uses it for writing resumes and surfing YouTube which I’m sure is a huge chunk of the market. Devs/Gamers/power users can’t make do with 8gb, but my sister in law who just does paper work and teams meetings all day is served well by her 2016 laptop, and wouldn’t have any issue with an 8gb MacBook.
Apple has their niche, but you’ll never find me owning a Mac. They are not useful for me. And fuck the proprietary nature of Apple in general.
That being said, I run 64GB of RAM and it’s glorious!
I daily drove a laptop with 8gb of RAM less than a year ago. Works just fine for most tasks. Granted, at Apples typical price point, I’d want more than that, but it is far from unusable. Running VMs wasn’t fun though.
And I’m here contemplating upgrading to 32 GB…
Pretty sure my phone has 8GB of RAM. Apple should probably rethink this.
I don’t disagree that 8GB is generally less than I would accept for normal usage, but the way this article is written you can tell the author really doesn’t have any reasonable grasp of memory management.
Predictions: the tradeoff here is (1) better thermals and battery wear, but (2) decreased responsiveness and (3) increased storage use, which in certain cases might result in (4) sudden sluggishness.
Explanations:
Disclaimer: I don’t work for Apple, haven’t read any tech bulletins on this, and will never read this article. I’m just guessing.
Me, with my PC that has 32 gb of ram: 😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂
laughs in 64GB ram
Oh come on...640kb is more than enough for everyone...
This option kind of make sense. For those using laptops for very light use, such as basic web browsing, Document editing, replying to emails and want to have a Mac could buy them.
If apple could sell 16GB variant at the price of 8GB, then that would be the best.
The reality distortion field is collapsing.
I disagree with this article. I do all my development on the cheapest macbook air (M1 with 8GB of RAM). It was $500. I’ve never noticed performance issues, and I work on some absolute monsters of projects, including game dev. It works waaaay better for Rust and TypeScript dev than my $3k Dell (fuck Dell), because unlike my Dell laptop it doesn’t crash every 3 hours and the battery lasts longer than 30 minutes.
8 GB non-upgradeable. Not unusable yet, but probably will be in a few years. Then they can sell you a new one.
“Nobody needs more than 64k of memory.”
Ginger666@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
But but the memory is more efficient, 8 is actually 16!
LMAOOOOOOO 🤡
tahoe@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
To be fair I had an 8Gb M1 Mac mini for about a year and never even once fell like it was lacking memory. I could open as many things as I wanted and it didn’t slow down, so I can kinda see where they were going with this. Not saying it makes that situation much better though.
I think the current base iPhones with 4Gb or 6Gb suffer way more from lack of memory than the 8Gb Macs, and people aren’t taking about this enough.
datavoid@lemmy.ml 4 weeks ago
I needed a cheap laptop for audio, so i decided to pick up a second hand m1 air a couple months ago.
It is honestly pretty impressive for the price, I generally don’t have issues either. Everything is snappy, and it handles multitasking fine. Its even faster than my $2000+ PC at several things, which frustrates me greatly.
However… When running ableton live (or presumably anything that involves heavy image, video, or audio editing), 8gb of ram is honestly not enough. If you push it too hard, it hangs for a second, then the offending app will just close.
Also there is a weird delay in factorio, absolutely unacceptable.
TheProtector0034@feddit.nl 4 weeks ago
I have a old HP Elitebook with 8GB ram with Windows 10 and even on Windows I don’t notice slowdowns for daily tasks. Yes the machine swaps but because of the SSD you don’t notice much performance decrease. However, because it’s constant swapping the lifetime of the SSD will decrease and that’s exactly the problem of 8GB machines these days. Yes the machine stays fast (Windows or OSX it really does not matter) but there is extra load on the SSD.
Don’t believe Apple marketing bullshit that 8GB is enough because of the “super duper advanced memory management” of OSX. If it really was enough then Apple would not release MacBooks with 16+ GB ram. The only reason that the 8GB MBP still exists is to sell more 16+ GB machines.
gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.works 4 weeks ago
The thing you didn’t notice is that you significantly decreased the service life of the permanent storage on the device, because it ABSOLUTELY dips into swap far more frequently than models with more memory, and all high-speed SSD technologies that I’m aware of have limited lifetime write capacity before performance and fidelity start to degrade.
The MBPs (MBAs too in my opinion, but that’s more debate as it’s the “entry level” laptop) should have a minimum ram config of 16gb. 8gb MBP is honestly a really dumb spec level to purchase anyways - if you want something with that little RAM in laptop form, get the MBA.
ulterno@lemmy.kde.social 4 weeks ago
To be honest, I can still do most of my work on my old Core2Quad 4GB DDR2 PC, when using Linux.
And as long as I setup my swap properly, I can also keep as many Firefox tabs open as I want , as I tend to forget tabs (running out of brain memory) before I run out of RAM.
scorpious@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
NO! No fair.
I delivered a season of 4k animations for a network show using Motion, AE, C4D, Ps, AI…all using a base model M1 Mini (8/256), with zero problems.
Of course more would be better, but unless you’ve actually used one, it’s hard to imagine how well it works. I tried mentioning this in another post, but it’s all Apple hate all the way down here
disguy_ovahea@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
People are, just not PC spec heads that like to compare numbers. Practical use is the only real comparison.
disguy_ovahea@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
UM on an SoC is not the same thing as RAM on a PC. It’s purely a storage liaison, since data is passed directly from core to core.
It’s not that it’s more efficient, it’s simply used less than in PC architecture.
Shadywack@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
It’s not that you’re wrong from a philosophical perspective with that, it’s that you’re factually incorrect. Memory addresses don’t suddenly shrink or expand depending on where they exist on the bus or the CPU. Being on the SoC doesn’t magically make RAM used less by the OS and applications, as the mach kernel, Darwin, and various MacOS layers still address the same amount of memory as they would on traditional PC architecture.
Memory is memory, just like glass is glass, and glass will still scratch at a level 7 just like 8GB of RAM holds the same amount of information as…8GB of RAM.
The article actually quantitatively tests this too by pointing out their memory usage with Chrome and different numbers of tabs open.
Looks like you didn’t read the article.
orclev@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
What a load of nonsense. You’ve got no idea how a computer works. RAM isn’t just used for passing data between cores. If anything that’s more the role of cache although even that isn’t strictly accurate.
Whether a system has a discrete GPU or not doesn’t really factor into the discussion one way or another, although even if it did having more RAM would be even more important without a discrete GPU because a portion of the system RAM gets utilized as VRAM.
RogueBanana@lemmy.zip 4 weeks ago
Guessing you haven’t rear the article. That quote is from apple not author, he is actually 100% against it throughout the article.
magiccupcake@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
This is a truly terrible article.
Like why not test these things? This just sounds like ai generated garbage.
That being said, 8gb is an abysmally low amount of ram in 2024. I had a mid range surface in 2014 that had that much ram. And the upcharge for more is quite ridiculous too.
I know it’s pc ram but I bought 64gb of ddr4 3600mhz for like $130. How on earth is apple charging $200 for 8!!!